Barbotage

Ingredients

1/2 ounce cognac

1 teaspoon Grand Marnier

4 ounces Brut champagne

champagne flute

Instructions:

Pour cognac (or another brandy) and Grand Marnier into a champagne flute, top up with brut champagne or a reasonable facsimile thereof (no need to go overboard in terms of quality, but you don't want something that you could use in a vapor degreaser, either).

There's another Barbotage the French seem to be mopping up these days in a certain quantity: Shake up with ice 1 teaspoon grenadine, 1/2 ounce lemon juice, and 1 ounce orange juice, strain it into a champagne flute, and have at it with the bubbly -- sort of a super Mimosa. If you wanna go that way, go that way. But we'll take the hooch -- and if you double the cognac, we should add, this makes a fine drink any time of day.

Many a cure, restorative, palliative, whatever, has been advanced in aid of crapulous humanity. ("Crapulous"? Not from Bill and Ted, but from the Latin for "hangover,, which is crapula. Really.) Some look to science, some tradition. Some take the path of virtue -- go forth thou and drink no more -- and others, of course, embrace the path of sin. Among the devil's antitoxins, nothing holds quite so much authority as champagne. As Edward Spencer Mott wrote back in 1899, "'Tis an expensive restorative, no doubt; but, just as you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs, so are most of our pleasant vices more or less costly in the long run. Champagne, i.e., genuine champagne, is about the most valuable restorative known to science."

Fair enough. But civilization has advanced since 1899. To counteract the modern, Jägermeister-Red Bull-vodka-J.D.-how many pints? crapula, champagne pure and simple might be overmatched. For especially virulent cases, some textbooks prescribe the addition of a supplement to the straight fizzy. This treatment is known as the Barbotage. That's French for "bubbling" or "splashing." In English, however, barbotage is "the production of spinal anesthesia by repeated injection and removal of fluid." If that sounds good to you this morning, you definitely need one of these.